Elisabeth’s Book
A Dell'Arte Company world premiere
July 23 (preview) opens July 24 - July 27
Our Festival promises you things from ‘around the world and down the block.’Elisabeth’s Book fulfills both—it’s a homegrown work, but truly international, with four collaborators from four countries:France, Spain, Moldova, and the US. What inspired the work were photographs by aCanadian artist of a Holocaust ‘artifact’ made in a Nazi Germany slave camp by aHungarian woman for her friend.
Conceived by Founding Artistic Director Joan Schirle, Elisabeth’s Book imagines the journey of a small Holocaust artifact made in 1944. The story, told mainly through images, movement and music, is inspired by a memoir written by Hungarian survivor Elisabeth Raab, to whom the 'book' was presented as a gift by her friend Ezster in a concentration camp. With their friend Hanna they were enslaved in a munitions factory where their job was to drill grenades. Elisabeth's Book is the exploration of friendship--three women of three generations--and creativity under conditions that test the will to survive.
Check out this video teaser with the cast and director/designer, Alain Schons:
https://vimeo.com/101126554(link is external)
From Founding Artistic Director Joan Schirle:
"I’ve always been inspired by things that evidence the work of human hands. I experienced an emotional shift when I first saw artist Thelma Rosner’s images of things crudely fashioned yet powerful, that seemed both banal and sacred at the same time. I saw materials I associate with masculine energy—metal, tools, weapons—repurposed through the feminine arts of sewing, weaving, embroidering, and the recycling of scraps from a grenade factory into symbols of domestic comforts-- a cooking pot, a flower, a heart, a poem—symbols of life outside the camp. Later I came to see in these images gestures of resistance, love, and means of survival, in the same way women recounted recipes in the camps both as a way to forget their gnawing hunger and to remember life before the camps.
This Holocaust ‘artifact’ belongs to survivor Elisabeth Raab, who after liberation in 1945 spent 3 years as a DP, or ‘displaced person,’ without papers, passport, money or protectors. 70 years later, (the anniversary of D-Day) there are millions of ‘displaced persons’ in countries around the world—refugees from wars of aggression, civil war, tribal war, religious war, wars over resources, boundaries and territories, deportees, political refugees, and those ‘resettled’ within their own countries. Elisabeth’s Booktries to remind us that creative acts help us to survive, and that our best hope of surviving the worst of times is friendship."
They say that “time assuages”,—
Time never did assuage;
An actual suffering strengthens,
As sinews do, with age.
Time is a test of trouble,
But not a remedy.
If such it prove, it prove too
There was no malady.
--Emily Dickinson
The first work-in-progress showings of this new took place in April and the full production premieres at the Mad River Festival. It was created in collaboration with director/designer Alain Schons, whose participation is funded by a grant from TCG Global Connections(link is external). Dell'Arte Internationalis a participant in the Global Connections–IN the LAB program, funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and administered byTheatre Communications Group(link is external), the national organization for the professional not-for-profit American theatre This project also received support from the National Endowment For The Arts, and the Lynne & Bob Wells Grant for Performing Artists at the Humboldt Area Foundation.
Elisabeth's Book by Joan Schirle, Alain Schons, Laura Muñoz, and Ruxandra Cantir
Original music by Joan Schirle, Gina Leishman, Tim Gray
Digital prints by Thelma Rosner(link is external).
Direction & Design: Alain Schons
Sound Design: Tim Gray
Lighting: Michael Foster
Costumes: Lydia Foreman
Cast:
Elisabeth: Joan Schirle*
Hanna: Laura Muñoz
Ezster: Ruxandra Cantir
Guard & onstage camera: James Hildebrandt
Stage Management & Sound Operation: Caitlin Volz
Technical Director & Props: James Hildebrandt
Photos: Carol Eckstein, Janessa Johnsrude,
Anthony Arnista, Michael Mathews
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